Mormon Bloggers

Jesus Christ: Be Still My Soul I hung up the phone after speaking with an acquaintance. His emotional and spiritual temperature seemed to change with every set of daily circumstances.  When something lent him favor, he was up and kind. He was humble when he positioned himself to see his blessings; when he forgot them, he was a different person. He dove off emotional cliffs that weren’t there. He acknowledged a miracle when he saw it and in the next breath, when an outcome wasn’t just what he expected, he was kicking and screaming. What I saw in my mind’s eye was, of all things, a fly.  I saw it buzzing all over the place, never with a secure or lasting landing place, not being anchored to something that would allow it to be still, quiet. I thought again of [Clay]: He was like that fly. I thought to myself, “He has no anchor in Christ, and is just like that fly, buzzing through life and changing colors with every event and happenstance.” I prayed for him. Peace... Read the rest of this entry »

Living in Utah has certain advantages…like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (I saw them in concert last night and it was amazing!). We have the Great Salt Lake, which is beautiful, even if you wouldn’t want to swim in it. We also have Zion’s National Park, Moab, Capitol Reef…hundreds of square miles of beautiful country (if you can avoid the road construction to get there…). But one of the coolest  Read More →

Sorry for the cliff-hanger, I didn’t mean to stress anybody. So as I was saying, with the Tupperware thing I was working full time as a Tupperware manager with around 50 consultants, I was also working full time as a Technical Writer, and I was teaching college writing classes two nights a week. We had three little ones at home and the Drama Queen was just past a year when I got pregnant with  Read More →

A car lurched from the Oklahoma country road into the highway. The driver didn’t stop at the stop sign. Instead, he stalled on the road a hundred yards in front of us. “Why doesn’t he get out of the way?” I asked from the middle of the front seat. Dad didn’t respond. He locked up the brakes and laid on the horn. Our late 1960’s American Rambler slid down the hill on screeching tires. Mother stopped talking mid-sentence in the back seat. She had just changed places with my sister and me a few miles back to talk with grandmother. I was in the middle of the front seat. My sister was to my right. Seatbelts? I can’t remember. Shoulder belts became law in 1968. I can tell you I wasn’t wearing one. Our California car probably crested the hill before the intersection doing 65 mph. Best guess from the photos looks like we hit the other car going 35 or 40. The impact pushed him into the ditch twenty to thirty feet past the crossing. Our car ended up on top of the stop sign. I remember... Read the rest of this entry »

Last September, a new initiative called Out in the Light was launched to help women who are affected by a pornography addiction of a spouse or loved one. Rachelle Call was one of the women featured in the documentary that kicked off this initiative. She’s created recovery music to capture what she’s learned (see music player below). Rachelle says: God is all about recovery…. If you knew my story, you would know that God is a god of miracles. There is not one reason why things should have worked out for me and my husband of 15 years. We were dead in the water. But God restored us. He raised me and my family from the dead — and I am not kidding about that. God can do anything. He can restore anyone. The Atonement is real and it heals. But those lessons were only learned after some dark and difficult times. As she struggled against the depression that threatened to consume her, Rachelle found that music brought healing to her soul. The darkness was so intense and I was... Read the rest of this entry »

The time has come for me to share one of my all-time favorite quotes.  This comes from an extended poem by Elizabeth Barret Browning entitled “Aurora Leigh.”  Browning is known as one of the most successful female poets in history and a biographer lauded her as “the most philisophical poet” and called her life “a Gospel of applied Christianity.”  Let me show you why these accolades are well-due.  “And truly, I reiterate, . . nothing’s small! No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere; No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim: And,–glancing on my own thin, veined wrist,– In such a little tremour of the blood The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries, And... Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been 5 years since I’ve had a new baby in the house. Of course, I knew before she was born that I had gotten very used to sleeping through the night, to eating dinner without being interrupted by a squalling baby, and to quiet Sundays where the older kids read and the younger ones play together (semi) nicely. I wondered how I was going to handle my plunge back into babydom, the land of ultimate (if forced) unselfishness. Here is how it has been: Every breath she has taken, every minute that’s gone by, every late night feeding and diaper changed – I want it all back, I desperately want it all to quit flying away so fast. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t wished I was in the hospital again, that she had just been born, and that I could have every minute of her life to live over again. That’s how much I love her.  Read More →

 Roger Ebert Someone sent me a blog post written recently in the Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert, the famous movie critic (thanks Alan).  It is interesting to read his analysis of how he characterizes the word “miracle.” He contends it is overused to explain a natural phenomenon. Ebert concludes, “Do I believe in miracles? No. I believe any event we observe can be explained by natural or scientific laws.” Ebert begins his blog with the observation the Chilean miners who were rescued recently after spending 69 days underground were not the recipients of a “miracle.”  Opines Ebert: “How much better to describe the rescue as the result of the fortitude of the miners and the skill of the good-willed people on the surface who reached them in what was, after all, a very short time. How much better to say the outcome in Chile was... Read the rest of this entry »

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I was born two weeks early.  Back in the 1970s, before many of the modern technologies hospitals have now to help premies, that was a big deal.  My mother told me I came out so fast, the doctor barely had time to get his gloves on to catch me.  It was determined that something was wrong with me and so tests were performed and it came as no surprise that my parents, especially my mother, were worried.  My father immediately called my grandpa to come and help him give me a priesthood blessing.  When they arrived at the hospitals nursery where I was, the nurses wouldn’t allow my grandpa and father inside for safety reasons regarding the other babies there.  But they did permit them to take me out into the hall, just outside of the nursery.  My grandpa said I was so small, he could hold me in the palm of his hand.  So in that cold, empty hospital hallway, with the priesthood they held, my father and grandfather gave me a blessing of healing. The next morning, when all the test... Read the rest of this entry »

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